Hacker News Reader

Comment by kashunstva | Hacker News Reader

> there is an optional subtle light behind each string that illuminates as the hammers strike. > activated by solenoids

Professional pianist here. Undoubtedly the toy illumination concept may be useful to someone; that’s fine. But they seem to be positioning this as a bespoke high-end instrument. I’m confused.

But replacing the action with solenoids? The double-escapement action of the modern grand piano is a thing of beauty. Reliable and nuanced; it’s irreplaceable. The tactile feedback, repetition rate, and feel offered by a well-regulated action is so essential to refined pianistic technique.

I wish them well; but I won’t hold my breath waiting for this to materialize. I’m not sure it should. Undoubtedly there is room still to innovate in piano design. Beethoven himself was closely allied with designers and manufacturers of the day after all. But LEDs in the style of gaming computers and solenoids?

View on HN

Yeah that stood out to me as well.

I think the LEDs are a nice option to have. Piano bars sometimes have big mirrors suspended over the stage so you can see the player’s hands; this is a much more flexible way to achieve a similar effect.

The solenoids though…. Oof. To your point, pressing a piano key is so much more than a binary on/off. Digital keyboards are quite good, but still different. It should certainly be possible to make a version of this that works, but (1) binary solenoids ain’t it and (2) the result would be fundamentally different from a traditional piano.

Lights can be turned off if you don't like them: only the proposed trigger and solenoid action is worrying.

As a professional pianist, have you ever played this kind of instrument? How good are "weighted" keyboards? How good are electric (or, why not, pneumatic) actuators in stringed instruments?

> The double-escapement action of the modern grand piano is a thing of beauty. Reliable and nuanced; it’s irreplaceable.

It certainly is an engineering marvel, but it is much heavier than an upright's action. Strong fingers required! :)

I'm confused how you can make such a statement, are you a professional pianist? How much force you need can vary by individual instrument, and with the proper technique and assisted by gravity everything seems much easier on a grand to me.

A typical grand piano action works against gravity: the hammers are underneath the strings and are propelled upwards by a series of levers connected to the keys. On an upright, however, each hammer is balanced upright and needs only be propelled sideways. Therefore, it's harder work physically to play a grand piano than an upright; this is compensated by a higher maximum volume with a concert grand because of how much larger the resonator is.

A baby grand isn't to be much louder (if louder at all) than an a full-size upright, but might still have less sympathetic vibration if the strings don't cross as much as they would on an upright. However, sympathetic vibration isn't necessarily undesirable; I'm convinced that the the opening bars of Schubert's Wanderer fantasy (D. 760) was composed deliberately to emphasise the effect.

Modern concert grands almost universally have the double-escapement action, which allows notes to be played very rapidly. That said, you only get the advantage of the massive leverage when starting from a state where the key is completely released, so all subsequent notes take a lot more force to be made at the same volume as the first. There are some uprights with double-escapement, but the are plenty that don't have it either... a 3/4-size 'spinet' a hundred years old is unlikely to possess such a refined mechanism (along with missing loads of strings, to add insult to injury).

Piano keys are weighted, this is to standardize as much as possible the downward force required to produce a sound. The lower keys are typically weighted heavier. You can have light grands and heavy uprights, it all depends on regulation and construction details but typically not all that much on the hammers, though the big factor is that the gravity assist allows for faster repetitation (as well as the double escapement, but that is because it can catch the key closer to the string so the next (and further) stroke requires far less movement and time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq2pb1u0HIE

I don't understand what you mean by the possibility of making a 'light grand'. Surely no amount of weighting can get around the fact that it is harder to lift a object up against gravity than it is to move it sideways, all else being equal. As such, I would expect a grand to require more force than an upright of comparable quality and leverage. Please could you elaborate on this?

The latter half of your comment I would agree with entirely; I would enumerate the factors like this:

1. The hammer falls down to its resting position with grands. This allows it to return to its resting position faster, at the expense of greater force required to move the hammer.

2. The double-escapement action of grands allows the hammers to strike again without the key having been fully released. This increases the maximum rate at which the same note can be played in succession, but again at the expense of greater force required because of the lack of leverage when not using the whole distance of the action.

3. Double-escapement mechanisms can be found on uprights, but these are different from the traditional grand action and are exceedingly rare. (From a cursory search online, the only such upright I can find currently for sale is the Bechstein Concert 8.)

At the back of the keys in a piano (and in a grand) there are lead weights that determine how much will be added to the weight of the hammer.

These are usually recessed in a hole in the side of the key.

Typically you'll be around 50 grams, no matter whether upright or grand. But the action is substantially different in construction and that can have all kinds of effects on key response once it is moving. You can test this for yourself with some reference weights.

A '60' would be on the heavy side, a 40 or even lower would feel very light.

Black keys tend to be a bit lighter (and are differently positioned on the cantilever) due to their shorter length of travel so it all works out roughly the same in the end. Treble keys tend to be weighted slightly lighter than bass keys.

I don't have an action in pieces right now so I can't make a picture of what the side of a key looks like, but I'll see if I can't find one online.

Thank you for explaining. So what I think you are saying is that you can make a grand feel as light as a typical upright because the weights typically added to pianos outweigh the inherent weight of the hammers that the grand would add to the action, giving plenty of leeway to adjust the action.

Exactly. The weights (different for each key) plus the total mass of the action (also different for each key) then shows up as inertia as you try to move the key (and you will need some force to overcome any friction) and I think that is where you will find your real difference.

Edit: so, I've found an image:

https://creativemarket.com/product/15418366-White-wooden-key....

If you look at the sides of the key you see two gray circles, those are lead weights, and they, more than anything determine the balance and weight of the key. Note that there also is a weight on the near side of the key! The weights on bass keys will be a bit larger at the back than for the treble side, and the hammers are also a bit heavier. You can still tune a lot in the action, but another major factor is simply friction. If there is lots of play in the pin that the key rides on it can make the action feel 'loose' all the way to unplayable (because the key will rub the keys next to it), and if it rides too tight (or has been twisted out of true) it will work so hard against the felt that you need a lot of force to overcome the friction. This all shows up as perceived weight, but it really isn't. It's just friction.

Piano actions are fascinating, apparently simple but they are really small works of art for each and every key. All the parts have to work 'just so' and they then still have to be regulated to get a really even action. One really nasty little thing that can happen is that the pins in the various action bits are corroded, this can cause lots of friction in ways that can be hard to track down to any specific linkage.

You can balance a grand action to the point that a landing fly would have a good chance to produce a tone. You don't want it that light though: your fingers brushing the keys would already cause them to move, a bit of resistance works.

There are extremes, a famous concert pianist (for the life of me I can't remember which one) for instance had his piano set for super light touch, so light that others found his instrument(s) unplayable. And on the other end there is the mechanical church organ, with keys so heavy that playing anything at all turns into a physical work-out. Talk about 'strong fingers required', you need to be in top physical shape for that.

That light action for pianos sounds interesting, but I replied[1] to your other comment so maybe we should keep the discussion on that thread.

As for organs on the other hand, I used to play a Victorian frankenstein^W 'hybrid' tracker organ in my local church (sadly now closed). The keys on that poor organ were certainly a work-out for the fingers, and of course got stiffer the more stops that were pulled out.

I personally believe that it is valuable to maintain these now-rare tracker organs for their historical merit - they were arguably the most complex machines ever created before the electronic digital computer took that title. However, when it comes to music, I'm not a purist: there is nothing about the stiffness of the keys inherent to the sound of a pipe organ, so I'm all for pneumatic control. Electronic keys also work well if care is taken to reduce the overall latency, as witness by the success of the Wurlitzer theatre organs.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054825

[2]: 'Hybrid' this instance means an original nineteenth-century tracker mechanism, combined with a 20th century blower and an electronic organ invisibly integrated into the instrument. Actually, not so invisibly, as it frequently malfunctioned. There is also record of a pneumatic action somewhere, but I haven't located it myself.

I played the organ in Liepaja, it was amazing. I'd move there if I could just to help keep it in shape. And yes, those should be preserved, there isn't all that many of them left. And organ component manufacturers are going out of business as well (Laukhuff, recently :( ).

Ah, I've found the pianist: it's Horowitz (I mistakenly thought it was Rubinstein), read here for some fascinating bits of piano lore:

https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=20859.0

Reply on news.ycombinator.com